I was recently asked, for complicated reasons, to write a column on “legacy journalism,” which I politely declined on the grounds that I didn’t know what the phrase meant. It sounded like Springsteen’s Glory Days, a song about local baseball bores who live in the past.

I hate the past, out of principle. It bores me.

And then I read a blog by a young American print reporter, Allyson Bird, who left the local newspaper business in South Carolina because it paid too little and was too demanding of her time. She was under 30, underpaid and burned out, she claimed.

“I don’t know a single person who works in daily news today who doesn’t have her eyes trained on the exit signs,” she claimed in her blog (called “Sticky Valentines,” imagine that).

I do.

I know so many young people desperate to get inside a newsroom, and so many older ones desperate to leave who can’t afford to. There is a shakeout in TV, publishing and journalism but young people still yearn for these jobs because they’re interesting. Any job can be a pit of soul-sucking despair but add boredom and you might as well be a plate of drying chicken fingers sitting under a heat lamp until the end of days.

We’ve all suffered in jobs like that. Bird, who does not mention her previous salary, now appears to be producing a newsletter for a local public hospital and freelancing when she can. Goodness me, it sounds deadly but to each her own.

TV is a wasteland. There are 975 channels on my cable provider’s lineup. Admittedly I only buy 150 of them of which I watch precisely three — two HBOs for Girls and CBC — and my husband watches the mostly soccer channel. But who needs hundreds of reality shows when your life is already a reality show a thousand times more intense and entertaining than watching tattooed men place bets on whether they’ll find corpses in abandoned storage lockers.

It should be so much better. Robert Lantos is right. If there were a Canadian movie channel, I’d watch it but there isn’t. For four channels buried in cable packages, I pay $160 a month. Two months of this will almost cover what I pay for paper news, which I devour because I’m gripped by my tattered city, my gormless province, my huge quarrelsome nation. I buy books and read online. TV, media, books, Internet, all these places seize my love, as they do that of any news hound.

What we like is the daily blast of everything. I need to keep in touch with the “unsynthesized manifold” — Kant’s phrase for all the multitude of stuff out there, only a fraction of which we can hope to encounter and less to grasp.

“The time has come to talk of many things,” the Walrus said. I love the sensation that the entire planet is streaming at me, that narrowing the filter is within my control and that I can write about the many things of which the Walrus spoke: shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.

This is where I part company with Bird, who left because she didn’t want an all-consuming job. The definition of journalism is its demand for immersion.

As a city reporter, “you’re exhausted, and you’re never really ‘off,’ ” she wrote. “You get called out of a sound sleep to drive out to a crime scene and try to talk with surviving relatives. You wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, realizing you’ve misspelled a city councilman’s name. You spend nights and weekends chipping away at the enterprise stories that you never have time to write on the clock.”

The thing is, you’re not suited to journalism unless the unsynthesized manifold looks like the ocean, something you want to throw yourself into violently. “You must in the destructive element yourself immerse,” Conrad wrote in Lord Jim about a young person who wanted to do heroic things.

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